Category: Accessible WordPress Themes

There are 46 posts filed in Accessible WordPress Themes (this is page 5 of 8).

Sometimes the best work you can do on a website is to remove things. In my case, it’s removing several plugins that are ultimately getting in my way.

If you’ve been running your site for a while, and you’re feeling hemmed in, consider taking a really good look at the plugins you have installed and active. If one or more of them are getting in your way, consider whether or not you need the functionality for your site, and, if you decide you don’t, remove the plugin and any related code snippets.

I have somehow managed to nuke my desktop Twitter client for work so that it won’t authorize. Seems like the perfect time to just switch to the official client, and mostly work on smoothing out the writing workflow for this site.
I’ll write more on this later, but for now I’m extremely pleased to report that I’ve trained my first blind client on #Gutenberg, and thanks to the hard work of everyone who’s worked to make it more accessible, they thoroughly enjoyed using it.
Cold emailing me to ask if I’ll link to your totally unrelated site because you’re a blind blogger is bad enough. Starting it all off with "Hello beautiful" when we don’t know each other at all is going to get you an instant nope.
Read WordPress should deprecate themes — a modest proposal by Mike Schinkel

Personally, I have never found a theme that is 100% useable without some significant HTML+CSS customization and/or PHP/MySQL/Javascript customization. And even the best themes use approaches that result in sites that require a huge amount of time to maintain the content because the themer made easy coding choices rather than build functionality to allow managing content with less effort. Examples include using categories to group content where a custom taxonomy would be better, and a custom post would be best.

WordPress themes as they currently stand should absolutely be done away with, even though the concept of separating presentation from content is an excellent foundation.

Sepearating content from presentation might have been the original purpose of themes, but that definitely hasn’t proved to be the case in practice.

Put more succinctly, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

As a general rule, I find that themes, (and I’m not including every theme developer or designer here, just lots of them), promise way more than they can ever deliver.

I can’t count the number of sites I’ve worked on over the years in which management of expectations with regard to what a client can do with a theme and what they can’t has played a significant role.

Add to this the complexities of customizing a theme so that it becomes accessible, (something required especially when there’s a lawsuit or demand letter or even just a desire to make the site accessible involved), and you have a recipe for more headache for the developer and the client than there should be.

There’s a reason I won’t touch anything from Theme Forest, which is admittedly the most extreme case but far from the only concentration of trashfire from a code standpoint that’s out there.

And I don’t see any of this changing until one of the least-modernized parts of WordPress, (the theme infrastructure) is gone.

If Gutenberg helps us get there, I’m all for it, even though I still think Matt should spend about three days without his mouse and monitor stuck with a screen reader and Gutenberg.